Thursday, June 30, 2011

Price drops and stokpiling


Since the creation of this blog I've yammered on at great length of the benefits and necessities of stokpiling. A few times even I've given very specific notes and advice on what, when, and how much to stokpile. Today I'm going to do the opposite and cite an example where you shouldn't stokpile by referencing the current state of a few markets in rift.

The primary reason you would want to avoid building up a stokpile is when prices are likely to go down. If you get a hint that they're about to drop (which can take many forms) you may want to consider selling off what you have piled up and save only what you'll be needing soon. This is when you make the shift from long term profits to making money on what you can sell today or tomorrow only.

The big problem here is that the signs of a price drop are usually extremely subtle and sometimes are entirely unnoticeable unless there's some patch notes that specifically state something about drop rates or material changes. It's very easy to get jumpy here and you have to resist bailing 99% of the time, but always keep your eyes open just in case.

Right now in rift, the price on raw materials are very slowly dropping lower and lower. It's only to the tune of a few gold here and there, but it is steady much like the way that gas prices raise IRL. Very slow and you won't notice it hurting your pocket until they're way up there. Same thing just in a different direction. With the materials slowing degrading in value you'd think that the price of the crafted goods are going down in stride right?

Wrong.

The prices of the crafted gear form blues to purples are staying the same. In fact a fist full of them have actually gone up since people aren't trying to sell them at all. That means it's time to really profit. My biggest gripe to date in the rift AH has been things selling under material costs and it looks like this might be about to change. If materials go down just a little bit more there will be room for some serious profit. But anyway, back on topic. Over the last week or so the price on a few high demand materials have gone down in price and have been in this new low range fairly consistently. Namely metal bars and lumber.

The main ones that I've notice go down are carmintium bars and shadethorn and runebirch lumber. The reasons for this are fairly basic. The large demand for all of these materials stems from the daily quests that use them and each needs a large amount of them. That high demand attracts the farmers to supply it while lowering the price due to a drastically increased supply. To give you an idea of how much they have dropped when I first got to the level that I needed them they were all around 50g each. As of this writing they're hovering between 10 and 15g each. That's quite a significant drop off.

The reason that a lot of the crafted goods haven't gone down in price is because at least 80% of these materials vanish when people craft items to turn in for their daily quests. So the amount that's left floating around at the end of the day winds up being rather low. Once the prices stabilize once again at their new price ranges is when it will be time to stokpile.

In addition to being able to grab mats super cheap mid day and on the weekends (just like saronite Saturdays in wow) that allows for more opportunities to flip the raw materials during the week when the farmers are off duty and prices rise. Meanwhile I'll be stashing a bunch away to craft all the stuff that needs them and supply my own daily quests.

One other reason for crafted items not falling in price that I can think of while I'm on this subject is that these materials aren't used directly in a lot of things. They're primarily used to craft other raw-ish materials which in turn go into all of the high end and high demand goodies. These "refined" materials can sell for almost double the plain material costs and the crafted items are now selling for a good profit because of this.

You'll almost never see the refined mats on AH because people only buy a few here and there to get what they need crafted and then ignore them. But as the CEO of Wal-Mart can tell you, these occasional sales are all that you need to become incredibly wealthy. That's my plan.


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